5 Directions Coldplay Could Go With Their Next Album

Word around the campfire is that Coldplay have been spending some time in an LA recording studio recording their long awaited follow up to 2011’s Mylo Xyloto. That should be great news for the band’s fanbase whose appetites have been stirred up by “Atlas,” their Grammy-nominated track from the The Hunger Games: Catching Fire soundtrack.

While there has been no indication about a release date for the LP, when it does finally see the light of day, there will likely be a lot of questions about how it will perform both artistically and sales-wise. Mylo Xyloto debuted at No. 1 on the charts in many countries, but its sales paled in comparison to the band’s peak, 2002’s A Rush of Blood to the Head. That disc sold a combined 6.7 million copies in the U.K. and U.S., whereas Mylo sold about 4 million less.

Granted, that could simply be a reflection of an overall decline in record sales (down 8.4% according to SoundScan), but it seems like even the band’s most ardent supporters had a hard time making sense of Mylo Xyloto‘s knotty concept, much less its tongue-twisting title. Critics, too, looked askance at this effort to combine sky-scraping rock with a 1984-like “art saves mankind” storyline.

This is a surprisingly similar story for artists at this point in their careers. Many of Coldplay’s peers and influencers have met similar crossroads, wondering how to either bounce back commercially or at least make a stronger artistic statement with their sixth album. With those in mind, we offer up the five most interesting directions for Coldplay to follow for their hopefully soon-to-be arriving next LP.

1. Go Achtung Baby

Another quartet of stadium-filling, socially-conscious rock stars, U2 were at their lowest ebb after their highest of heights via The Joshua Tree. Try as they did to avoid it, the band were on the verge of becoming the rock star buffoons that they attempted to provide the alternative to. So, how did they respond? They retreated to Berlin and made a weird, glammy, and funky LP layered with weird synthesizer and guitar textures and roundabout rhythms. Coldplay could use a little of that same spirit; an embrace of the fact that being in rock band is a fairly ridiculous career choice. It could be fun to hear them up that campy aspect of it and strip away as much of the celebrity ego that surrounds bands like theirs. And if they accidentally skip over Achtung and land instead in Pop territory, it should at least make for a fascinating failure.